Avoid fly by night services, plugins and linking when blogging
Posted By RichC on March 23, 2018
Here’s some advice from someone who as blogged daily since 2005 — AVOID using data, photos, video, etc archived on other services. Over the years, I have been frustrated by “what seemed great at the time” using services offered by companies who specialize in hosting data for users.
A little history: It started for me when shopping around for the best “host” for my business website — cppnet.com. I opted to host on a Canadian server promising 
better service, support and low prices. Unfortunately after also using them to host some rudimentary websites for my customers as well, they sold out and I lost direct control of my data and more importantly the domains I handled. Months later I was able to retrieve, but not without significant effort.
It was about that point I opted to run my own servers and offer space on them to my customers … mostly as a way for me to save their printed jobs and archive their files (it is amazing to see the Akron Audubon Newsletter issues go back to 1997!). But times change and eventually cloud services take over the local archival duties.
As for blogging, off-loading bandwidth and data intensive video seemed like the only way to stream data back in the day … except they once again, users are dependence on the company(ies) they choose to use. One of the obvious choices initially was Google Video. Unfortunately data saved and served with them is now defunct as of 2012 (after purchasing YouTube). As for the afore mentioned, YouTube is notoriously shortsighted when shutting down a users account. Practically all my early video (home video and otherwise) were deleted after I including a 3 minute segment (properly credited) of Ed Begley Jr talking about biodiesel with Oprah. That’s the video gripe.
Additionally and more recently, I’ve used a variety of slideshow plug-ins and embedded tools linked to cloud services (like picasaweb.google.com). Unfortunately many have failed and left archived slideshows gone. Depressing. Sure, I probably have the original photos somewhere on my hard drive or backups, but they are no longer archived conveniently on my blog where I wanted them. Even WordPress plug-in drift in and out of support leaving users stuck and having to rebuild 100s of embedded photos or ignoring.
Unfortunately, just like having your Kodachrome 35mm slide carousels without a projector, 8mm home movies, video tapes taken on Betamax, VHS, VHS-c, 
8mm video or for that matter data stored on floppy disks, Syquest carts or a hundred other mediums … you’re in trouble. So … it may be safer for bloggers to pass on the latest and greatest flash in the pan and stick with basic data formats. Currently we’re still safe so as long as each page consists of text, individual jpgs, .mp3 audio and .mp4 video … but who knows how long that will last?
My advice (currently being ignored by me) is to price a hard copy of each page and stick in in a notebook … although it does little for audio and video.
For posterity, here was the first video I posted to my blog — richc.myarchive.us — in the spring of 2005 with friend Charles at one of our CinciTDI GTGs.
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